The Last Degree of Savagery
by R. Donald James Gauvreau
Summary: The Alternian Empire fell, and at last there was peace. For a little while, anyway.


All sapient peoples remember the day that the Alternian Empire halted its cold advance. Its legions fell almost as one. Their roboterrorist auxiliaries continued to function and would be a common menace for generations to come, but without higher direction the majority of them could be handled with adequate preparation.

It was a golden age at first, and an age of expansion as the battered remnants of five galaxies spread out and reclaimed the worlds which had been stolen from them and countless slaughtered species. It was an age of renewal and reclamation, and of new discoveries: the remnant peoples found and welcomed in the kobolds and the pucks, and told them of the horrors that had once plagued the universe.

For a time the very thought of the Empire was taboo, but then the goblins finally sent an expedition to their homeworld. Nobody knew what had killed the trolls, and that meant that it was possible for others die by the same cause. As much as the goblins, like everyone else, would have liked to just roll the planet into the nearest black hole, they had to make sure that there was no danger.

The planet was half-dead. Meteors had riddled its surface and killed off almost every living thing. The cities were being reclaimed by wildlife, but even so there were places where the only things that stirred were the undead.

Many wonderful things were learned, as well as many terrible things. Atrocities were uncovered that no one had dreamt of. At last it was discovered what had befallen the brownies, and there was much mourning for their sake across all known space. But the goblins pressed on, determined to find the truth— though the ultimate cause was as-yet unknown, it was obvious that some force had come and destroyed their world. Such a storm could not have been of natural origin.

At last they found what they were looking for, though they did not know it. They had discovered a piece of programming, a game of all things. It was recent, according to Alternia's time frame, a creation of its last days, but that was possibly its only claim to noteworthiness.

It was ignored. And then a team of scientists investigated further, as other records were exhausted. None of them expected it to be of any worth; the goblins had long since given up on their original mission and had to content themselves with cataloguing the remains of Alternian civilization. The game was at the bottom of the pile, but eventually even that was investigated and catalogued.

Their world died almost overnight.

The kobolds were the first to investigate _them_, and some researcher among them proposed that the ultimate cause of it all was the _game_, whose programming turned out to be more complicated and even paradoxical than was first realized. The idea was ridiculous, but someone slipped it into the selkies' information network and the experiment proved itself.

The Great Peace of earlier times had long since begun to fail, and battle lines were being drawn between civilizations. The mysterious destructions visited upon the goblins and selkies, so similar to what had laid low the Alternian Empire, only stoked their paranoia. When the Grand High Command of the Kobold Oligarchy was inducted into the secrets of the game, they had no shortage of enemies to use it on.

By the time that the gremlins learned their secret and stole it for themselves, the gnomes, basilisks, and hags had already been annihilated. The gremlins were betrayed by the manticores, one-time allies to whom they had given the game. The ogres banned the game among their people, so the wendigo forced kidnapped children to play it. And nobody noticed the new colonists, the Carapacian cities that cropped up on these worlds, centuries after civilization had ended.

Sessions were started. Meteors fell. Sometimes, universes were born.

By the time that Snowman died, and the universe with her, there were only Carapacians left to take note of it.


End file.
